ProBono

PILA becoming Pro Bono Aliance

PILA is becoming a Pro Bono Aliance

Dear friends,

We would like to inform you that civil society organization Public Interest Lawyers Association (PILA) is changing its name. From now on you will meet  us under a new name - Pro Bono Aliance (PBA).

The name has been changed for several reasons:

We would like to implement our activities under a name, which better represents our activities in front of our partners and public. Pro bono is a traditional term in the world of lawyers. Development of pro bono activities is one of our main activities.

We understand the term pro bono in broader terms. We would like to continue to work on increasing number of lawyers, who are using their expertise and abilities for public benefit – pro bono publico. Therefore our activities will include not only development of pro bono legal services, but we will also follow other possibilities of increasing access to legal aid. We will continue our efforts to ensure that legal education more contributes to responsible performance of legal professions.

We would also like more than before to work with you as a team. We would like to be a real alliance, alliance of those, who see law as a helping toll and legal profession as a profession with mission to serve the public. Last but not least we also hope that the new name will be more easily remembered by professionals as well as by public.

We hope that under the new name we will continue to achieve our goals at least as successfully as in the past. We believe that we can refer at least 50 requests of CSOs to law firms per year (www.probonocentrum.cz), to provide advice about accessibility of legal aid to more than 300 clients per year (www.potrebujipravnika.cz) and we would like to contribute to improve the current legal framework of free legal aid (www.bezplatnapravnipomoc.cz)....

We welcome any suggestions for improvement of our work as well as your personal participation in our projects (lawyers and other professionals willing to volunteer to provide consultations, trainings, facilitation, writing articles etc., are never enough, we also benefit from the volunteering work of law students), we will highly appreciated any financial or material support.

We also change our official seat. The new address of our organization is Příběnická 1908, 39001 Tábor.

We hope that you will continue to support our organization in future.

Vítězslav Dohnal

Director, Pro Bono Aliance